My first little app for Android is out there. Cursed a lot, but had fun, will write more.

To get up and running was less than an hour. Great.

Michael wrote the original iPhone version, sent me screenshots, I wrote a native Android version based on his app. Ha!

Norbert tried to write the same app in Appcelerator Titanium for iPhone and Android. He progressed way faster than Michael and I did, but then hit the wall. Weird bugs and spotty SDK support, some stuff worked on iPhone but not on Android.

It’s nice to work with low resources and computing power again. Feels just like 25 years ago. Nice.

The Android SDK is shiny. But it gets even more shiny for later versions of Android. Yet you keep stumbling into stuff where you wish you could use the more elegant later versions. “Don’t use this, this is deprecated!” yell the docs, “use x instead, but x is marked Android versions 3.0 and up. Google recommends that you develop for 2.1 or 2.2 up, so I use the deprecated stuff.

This is extremely frustrating. I wish I could just develop for Android 4. Thanks to Google’s inability to stop the market’s fragmentation of Android versions, this will not happen for a long time.

It’s difficult to build nice user interfaces and to avoid jerky animations. Michael’s iPhone app looks and feels a lot more smooth than mine on Android.

Boy, it’s sad that Maemo/Meego got killed. They had Python on a phone! And real Linux SDKs! Why did it have to be this weird Frankenjava for Android?

Stackoverflow rules supreme. Say, how did we develop software before this?

The “Play” app market sucks. It feels like there is no chance in hell for a small unknown app to get noticed in that spam-infested dirthole.

Worse: The other markets suck even more than “Play”. It’s strange that you need to consider several markets in the first place. But then try to publish something there. Most of these alternative markets look like a collection of broken half-baked forms hacked up in PHP3 by the CEO’s teenage nephew. Forms that forget their content because of a missing required field – is it 1997 again? Try to modify the description of your app and one site will reject the form submit because the app’s name already exists in the database. D’oh. And each market wants the developer to implement their proprietary DRM scheme. Why, sure!

It’s tough to get noticed. I feel sorry for the journalists, they must be getting bombarded with “please review our app” requests like, uhm, mine. Tried to contact a few who wrote “Apps for Kids” articles in the past and there was little to no response.

See all those cute “apps for kids” blogs that claim to be mums who enjoy writing about apps they like? Well, don’t try to look behind the curtain. Contacted a few and the response I got was a pricelist. Payola. Seems like many of those blogs are SEO projects and/or a scam.

Then again, maybe there is simply no market for our app. It’s the Kids’ Music Player App for iOS and Android. If you have little kids (2-6 years old), go check it out or spread the word about it. Our kids like it a lot.